1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computers. More specifically, the present invention relates to computer architecture.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, instruction instances for a portion of a program are stored in an instruction cache. Since many instruction instances are stored in virtual memory, an address translation buffer stores the physical addresses and the virtual addresses for address translation. During instruction fetching, a fetch target is identified with a virtual address, which is then translated with the address translation buffer into a physical address. The corresponding instruction instance is read out of the instruction cache based on the physical address.